Closing Thoughts on SMX Social Media&nbsp2007

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

I'm back in Seattle after a short trip to NYC for SMX Social Media. I live-blogged a couple of sessions on Tuesday and tried to live blog the "Evangelist - The Marketer's Role in SMM" session, but I lost my post before I published it. (And no, I didn't save it. Yes, I am dumb.) I did cover Rand and Liana Evans' presentations for the Micro Communities session for Search Engine Land, plus there are lots of other recaps there and throughout the web.

I think that overall the conference was a success, especially considering it's the first conference I've been to that was explicitly dedicated to social media tips and tactics. Most of the sessions were quite interesting and engaging, with only a couple of presentations that felt a bit overlapping. I got a lot of positive feedback on my presentation, with people telling me that I "woke them up," which I relish in a bit more knowing that Rand spoke before I did. Take that, boss! (Note: I'm joking. Presenting first thing in the morning sucks. I've done it before, and the audience is pretty stiff, so I'm thankful I didn't get Rand's slot. He did get some laughs and kudos, and I am of the opinion that he's definitely a helluva better speaker than I am.)

Anyway, I thought the keynote Q&A with Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us and Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon was a bit disappointing--it felt more like a tutorial on how to use their sites and less like honest, valuable feedback for attendees and the questions they posed. I really hate when company spokespeople answer questions with "We'll look into that" or "We can't tell you right now, but it's something I can research," etc.

A friend of mine felt that the conference was great for marketers who haven't yet gotten into social media but not as valuable for those who already do social media marketing and want more advanced or expert tips, and I agree with her. A lot of the sessions (mine included) were a great overview of why certain social media approaches (link bait, bookmarking, social media news sites, etc) are valuable to your marketing and branding campaigns. For future social media-centric conferences, I would really like to see more specific or advanced sessions thrown in with the "An Introduction to Such and Such" panels.

I have to close by saying that I am extremely proud of my good friend and fellow lady in SEO, Tamar Weinberg. Danny made her speak on the "Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites" panel virtually against her will. I know how nervous she was, but clearly the audience deduced that she knows her stuff because every time I saw her she was answering an attendee's questions about social media tactics. I bet she snagged a ton of business cards. Way to go, Tamar--you've certainly made a name for yourself in the past year, and I'm very happy and excited for you.

If you attended SMX Social Media, I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions. What did you like? What didn't you like? What would you like to see more of for the next conference? What would you like to see that's new? How gross was it that while I was in NY my allergies rendered one of my nostrils completely plugged up and the other one inexplicably mucus-free? Did I actually just type that?

About rebecca —
Rebecca Kelley is the content marketing manager for Intego, a Mac software company. She also guest-blogs/freelances at various places and runs a couple hobby blogs for shits and giggles.

I wasn't there, so my comments are solely based on what I've read about the conference, my previous conference experiences, and my stubborn biases.

Digg is not worthy of multiple panels, speakers and presetations, not because it is useless, but because a lot of people get one or two items on Digg Popular and claim their expertise. Find someone - Tamar, for example - who truly is a power digger. She is an expert. Have her speak about Digg.

Challenge others to speak about other things and truly present an advanced, insightful look at social media. I tried to get this across in my Whiteboard Friday, but there is so much more to social media than the three services we're used to using. Your audience - the public - don't use Digg. They probably hardly use StumbleUpon. They read forums, they use social networking sites, they circulate in micro-communities that you've never even heard of, let alone played on.

But yes. I was not there. I'm just jonesing for London, because it's been way too long since I got my conference on!

In my opinion I don't really think that you are trying to reach the general public with Digg...you are trying to make the bloggers blog about you which in turn end up making more links to your site. And as an end result you end up with more search engine juice, where your general audience does hang out. Many bloggers read Digg because they all want to be the first with up-to-the-minute information.

That being said, I do agree there are a ton more things you can do besides Digg. I think a lot of web marketers feel that Digg is like low hanging fruit, because in order to become part of a microcommunity you really must establish yourself as a major contributor gaining respect via personality, humor, or creative knowledge.

As for StumbleUpon, it will only get bigger though and it's not as Gestapo as Digg. I really liked the concept that it's like a TV remote that can be used to channel surf the web at random.

Great points. I think StumbleUpon does have great potential to become mainstream, because you can tell the system that you like just about anything, not just the subjects that generally make Reddit's and Digg's homepages. StumbleUpon can have appeal to anyone.

I agree about Digg: there's the potential to be noticed by the "linkerati" and written about / linked to on a mass scale. However, I'd love to see social media coverage in the SEO / marketing world move from Digg to more innovative arenas, because we've just heard so much about Digg lately and everyone's pretty clued up on how to use it. Let's get innovative :D !

This said, I've always been impressed with the way a big digging can create buzz elsewhere... we got a call from the BBC about one of our Diggbait pieces once

I'd like to see more focus on instances of structured linkbait buzz that starts in "micro-communities" and less-traditional areas expand into the mainstream. The instances I've seen where people have leveraged other areas have been innovative, interesting and profitable. But you're definitely right that we should keep on using Digg et al as well, because the content we do manage to get on there is in front of the "right eyes!"

I usually fetal up when I sleep, it's just that I conveniently ran out of my A-squad allergy meds (I had to revert to my B-squad pills that kind of suck) and my nasal spray right before my trip, and I didn't have time to refill them. I was a stuffy, sneezy mess in New York.

"A friend of mine felt that the conference was great for marketers who haven't yet gotten into social media but not as valuable for those who already do social media marketing and want more advanced or expert tips, and I agree with her"

:P

Reb' I thought I rescued you with Flonase... :)

I agree with the audience, Brent's presentation was pretty good. I was really surprised when he told me that it was his first time.

Tamar's presentation was also solid. It was very interesting to listen a digg expert!! 2 thumbs up for Tamar ;)

Let's not forget that the vocal few who are likely to comment on blogs like SEOmoz are probably the same folks who have lots of experience in social media and web marketing overall. Thus, it's not quite a fair representation of attendees to ask if the sessions were too basic or too advanced.

In my opinion, our best bet would be to look at the feedback forms from the show to see how the general attendees felt.

I came away with a satified feeling from the conference content. Since it was the one of the first Social Marketing only events. There really wasn't any other event of that kind to establish a baseline in which to judge what "advanced tactics" really mean.

I tended to get the feeling that not everyone was giving up the super good stuff, but rightly so...they are still making money on it so why would you want others to dilute a good thing when you currently have a competative advantage.

Plus there were members from StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Yahoo, and Wikipedia...you don't want to ruin your technical advantage by telling the owners what holes to plug. Matt McGee had a great one for Yahoo Answers that he didn't mention because Yahoo Marketing was there. I'm sure he'll blog about it in the future, so keep an eye on his blog.

All and all, as I told you on Tuesday night at Elmo's I thought you did an excellent job Rebecca! There is plenty of time to bring more to the table next time. Your session and several others gave me some great ideas to try.

I would like to see in future Social Marketing events the balanced use of offline viral content to spark online viral content.

Why is it so many conferences focus on the 101 or even 201 level of understanding and not the advanced topics? I would assume it it just a numbers game since the largest amount of people available are looking for beginning to intermediate training. But I would enjoy hearing your thoughts.

I'm hoping that the main reason this one was so introductory was because it was the first conference of its series, so maybe Danny and crew were testing the waters. Hopefully they can read a lot of feedback and will adjust the next conference to have more higher-level stuff.

Thanks for your SMX presentation and this post Rebecca. I always feel that the true value of these conferences is in networking and being with industry peers in a concentrated way...both those less and more advanced than the next person.

I was there and thought the same thing - for the most part. The first day had a lot of Digg-centric overlap, but the second day really had some great value (esp. "Evangelist - The Marketer's Role in SMM" - sorry about your post!). I though Tamar did a great job - far better than she gave herself credit for and it was great to meet her in person.

As someone who's working as a Social Media Strategist, it would be great to have panels beyond the basics - and I still learned a significant amount.

BTW - I enjoyed your presentation. Yours was my favorite panel of Day 1 (plus a couple of individual presentations). Thanks for the write up.

Based on the informal room polling, 'who's already using service/site xyz?' it seemed that the majority of attendees were already well into the world of social media, and while the overviews were good, I think plenty of people were really looking for more ways to maximize and improve upon their existing efforts.

Naive I may be, but I had no idea that Social Media Marketing still flourished enough to warrant a whole conference.

Of course, that very well could be a biased opinion, as I don't exactly offer products to those involved in social-media-anything.

Anyways, maybe I should've been there (or read anything else on the matter.... short patience), but I think what us marketers are REALLY looking for, is how to properly interact with any given social-media-segment, without coming across as 'Just another advertising campaign', or worse yet... a 'Splog'.

In that particular realm, a successful campaign should not be measured by the dollars gained in the short term, but by our overall 'appearance' to the community members itself. Which, if done properly, will only drive long-term success.... something that can't be weighed immediately.

I agree with those who felt Day 1 had a lot of overlap. The presenters never lacked enthusiasm or knowledge. It was just too much of the same suggestions, techniques and constant focus on Digg.

Day 2 was very different. My big takeaway was the realization that big advertising companies are using social media in their marketing campaign and literally have staff assigned to various SM networking sites researching, getting to know communities and their environments and applying their first hand experiences to client campaigns. This is time consuming work.